


Still Alive

by willowoftheriver



Series: only when i hit the ground [3]
Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse), Resident Evil - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Alternate Universe, Angst, Apocalypse, Bad Sex, Bleak, Childbirth, Discussion of Abortion, End of the World, F/F, F/M, Fights, Grief/Mourning, Implied Relationships, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Infant Death, Insanity, Love/Hate, M/M, Mild Gore, Mild Sexual Content, Not Happy, Obsession, One Shot Collection, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Self-Harm, Self-Hatred, Sequel, Stillbirth, Suicidal Thoughts, Survivor Guilt, Unhealthy Relationships, Unplanned Pregnancy, kind of, probably a lot of really horrible things to come
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-02-18
Updated: 2017-02-05
Packaged: 2018-03-13 13:43:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 8
Words: 11,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3383783
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/willowoftheriver/pseuds/willowoftheriver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"This is the way the world ends<br/>Not with a bang, but a whimper."<br/>-T.S. Eliot</p><p>Claire's dead and Wesker's won, but it's turning out to be a rather Pyrrhic victory. Reality can be a bitch like that.</p><p> </p><p>Sequel to 'Pet'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. sheva: love is not a victory march

**Author's Note:**

> So my vague idea of having a series of one shots with really no main plot has finally been messily birthed! Seriously, don't expect any plot save lots of people angsting in shitty survival situations. And probably being given more horrible things to angst about. This AU brings out all my most sadistic inclinations, evidently.
> 
> Expect more pairings, characters, and warnings than are currently listed. I definitely want to work in Sherry/Jake somewhere, but I'm still working on how . . .

Sheva wants to cry. She wants to breathe.

But she can’t do either, so instead, she climbs. One hand at a time, feet following, the skin of her palms fusing with overheated leather as her fingers wrap around rope and somehow, somehow she makes it to the next rung.

Her eyes might as well be on fire for what they feel like, dry, searing pits in her face swollen with tears they can’t shed. Her vision bursts black and red, long distorted shapes that leave her half-blind, fumbling to move as her ears ring and her stomach rolls, vomit sloshing up past her screaming lungs into the back of her mouth.

She wishes she could close her eyes and it would all go away. The heat and the sulfur and the pain, the swaying of the ladder, the whirring of the helicopter blades, the lunatics on the ground and the body in the plane, who she is, what she is, what’s coming.

But all that really happens when she closes them is that instead of taking her away, it takes her _back_ , traps her in that instant and repeats it over and over again. They had been so close, so close that it makes her body _ache_ with the thought of what she _should’ve—could’ve—might’ve,_ but then Wesker had called out to his rabid dog.

It was funny now to think that for a second, Sheva hadn’t thought he’d do it. _Funny_ in a way that makes her want to tear her hair and _hit hit hit something anything everything_ until she’s bloody.

Because Claire had been—had been—

She’d been auburn hair and blue eyes and beautiful sadness, smiles that were all the better for their rareness. She’d been determination and quiet strength and hope and light and _good_ in every way that Wesker was vile. She’d loved, loved _him,_ in a way Sheva could barely fathom or understand, so intensely that no matter how far it stretched or how much it twisted, it could never fade. There has been so little love in Sheva’s life that she doesn’t think there would even be words to describe being loved like that, that the beauty of it would transcend language and thoughts and everything else.

And Redfield snuffed it all out for the sake of that _thing,_ without so much as a second thought, a hesitation, a tear _._ He’s a whore on a chain at his master’s command, and what hurts like a knife to the gut is that Sheva doesn’t think Claire would’ve thought any less of him even now. She probably wouldn’t want Sheva to either, would plead his case and play devil’s advocate and make a thousand excuses but nothing can change the fact that Sheva _does_.

She _hates_ him, **_hates_** him as much as she hates Wesker, hates him as much as she loves Claire, and she wishes that she’d killed him during the seven minutes of cat and mouse or in the hangar, whenever wherever however she could’ve. She would’ve died smiling if she just could’ve taken him with her.

But instead she’s alive and climbing a ladder with the thud of Claire’s body hitting the floor playing in a loop behind her scalding eyes as the world falls apart around her. Her lungs want air, throat begging to open— _just a little, anything_ —but she _can’t_ because it’s in the air, it’s _everywhere_. It could already be _in_ her for all that she knows, because as much as she’s tried not to breathe who ever said that that was the _only_ way it could be contracted? It could’ve already clung to the membranes of her nostrils and eyes or the top layer of her skin or a cut or a nick or a burn and started burrowing down down down towards blood and tissue and organs.

Uroboros was a rumor a month ago. A week ago, even. It’s such a short time but it’s like a crack has opened up, a massive divide between _then_ and _now_. Neither of them seem real, either, like there could ever possibly have been something else before this, or that this could be _happening_ even as it is.

Yet there’s no way to escape it. It’s below her, in the black writhing ropes covering the ground, in Wesker clutching Redfield like he’s a doll as oily virus seeps into their skin. It’s in front of her, as her fingers finally claw the metal floor of the helicopter and Josh hesitates to touch her to help her up, eyes scared behind a mask on his face.

He gives her one to strap on her head, but breathing, the rush of oxygen to her brain, does nothing but make it all _sharper_. She’s here, caught in this moment in a world she doesn’t want to be in, and she is powerless to do anything except remember Claire’s voice and Redfield’s gunshot and Wesker’s laugh and Excella’s screams as the Virus tore her apart. It’s like a funeral dirge, playing only for her.

And all Sheva can do is close her eyes and listen and wait.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you noticed the Sheva/Claire, trust me, it was on purpose.
> 
> The story is named after the song by Lisa Miskovsky from Mirror's Edge.
> 
> The chapter title is from the song Hallelujah by-well, numerous people, I think, but I was listening to the Jeff Buckley version.
> 
> -Anna


	2. rebecca: sleep in your only memory of me

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See trigger warnings in the tags. I'll also include them again at the end if you want to look at them first.

Rebecca makes sure that everyday, she smiles five times. No less, certainly no more, and always in the presence of someone else, because there would be little point to it otherwise.

This is harder than it should be, because despite them all being crammed like sardines into a bunker designed to hold far less people, she spends the majority of her time in the medical rooms. Ever since the initial flood of injuries sustained on the surface, her beds have all remained largely empty because no one can see a doctor for a cold anymore; antibiotics can’t be wasted for anything less than a major infection, nor bandages short of a hemorrhaging wound.

If she wanted to, she could just be on call. She could spend her days out amongst the others, trying to be productive or entertaining or anything just to pass the hours.

But she doesn’t want to. She’s away from eyes in her workspace. She can sit in one place for hours, staring fixedly at a blank wall without really seeing it. She doesn’t have to talk. She doesn’t have to smile.

Eventually the clock will strike six in the afternoon. It’s a meaningless number now, in this sunless, static bunker, in this world that’s decayed beyond time, but the others have clung to it, leaning on what little routine they can retain. It means dinner, and Rebecca will get up and go out and sit and smile. She will talk when she’s spoken to, and occasionally even when she isn’t. She will eat everything on her plate, no more and no less.

If she’s only reached four smiles that day, she’ll turn around and throw one over her shoulder at Jill or Barry or Leon as she follows Billy back to their room, wishing them a good night through her teeth.

Then she’ll go to sleep and try not to dream and wake up in the morning to start it all over again.

Opening her eyes is always the worst part. Sleep, dreamless sleep, is sweet and soft and kind, and to leave it, to open her eyes and remember where she is, makes something clench deep in her chest. There’s always some nagging disappointment, a burn behind her eyes at the fact that she’s _still here_. She didn’t die during the night, fade off into that gentle oblivious abyss, and she continues to exist.

She doesn’t know how she always gets up, how her muscles find the strength for that first movement. How she goes to breakfast. Smiles her first smile of the day, at Carlos or Moira or Ashley.

Then she goes and sits at her desk by her examination table, and sometimes there are patients. Barry with his hypertension that she can do almost nothing about because she doesn’t have the medicine, former President Graham with the diabetes she hopes might cure itself soon as their near-starvation diets take their toll. His daughter Ashley comes to her when she begins shedding clumps of hair, one of the flip reactions from the same thing. Parker Luciani has two teeth rotting out of his head and Senator Benford gets migraine headaches from eyestrain ever since he lost his glasses in the panic up above.

Jill, when she comes to her three months into their confinement, is paler than Rebecca has ever seen her, her mouth a slit, her hands clenched in the crooks of her elbows.

“I’ve been sick,” she says, and Rebecca doesn’t think she imagines the tiny tremor in her voice or the cold sick dread in her eyes. At first, her stomach clenches because her mind automatically jumps to infection and all the implications that brings, but with each symptom the other woman lists, she begins to realize that isn’t it. (And what it _is_ doesn’t relieve the tension; it just makes something sink down into her, cold and dead.)

“There aren’t any tests here,” says Rebecca, swallowing roughly. “But I don’t think there’s anything else it could be . . .”

And Jill shakes her head and looks to the side, at the wall, at the ceiling, fingers going white around her arms. “No, no. I can’t. _This can’t_ —I—No. Not now. Isn’t there _anything_ you can give me?”

She knows they’re the wrong words as soon as she says them, teeth clanking as she slams them shut. She turns her head slowly back to her, hesitating, and finally opens her mouth again, but Rebecca doesn’t want to hear what she has to say.

“No,” she says curtly. “I don’t have anything. I’ll need to see you back in three months.”

She turns around then and stares at the jars of cotton swabs and boxes of gloves until Jill finally climbs down and tiptoes away, clicking the door shut behind her. She’ll try to talk to her later, of course, but Rebecca will do everything to make sure she doesn’t get the chance.

At dinner that night, she doesn’t look at her, and even though she’s only up to four smiles, she goes to her room without looking over her shoulder. When it comes right down to it, she doubts that anyone really notices, anyway.

That night she sits beside Billy on a too-narrow bed in their tiny concrete box lit by the lamp sitting by itself atop the nightstand, the only other piece of furniture in the room.

“You okay, Princess?” asks Billy after a while, and she doesn’t have to fake the little smile she gives him.

“Not really,” she replies, because what else can she say? But he’s learned in these last months that, for now at least, she doesn’t want to talk about it. So all he does is kiss her on the forehead and let his fingers linger, brushing through a few strands of hair.

He goes to sleep before her, and she spends _minutes—hours_ that spiral off, their boundaries loose and fluid, staring up into blackness.

Then it shifts and takes on an inky half-mahogany sheen formed into the nooks and curves of music rack. She’s standing at a grand piano, huge and polished and elegant and out of place in the middle of her homey little family room with its end tables and couch and chairs all covered with the gifts she received at her baby shower. Rattles and bottles and clothes, toys and pacifiers all amongst scraps of wrapping paper and ribbon that creep towards her an increment with each note she misses.

 _What was_ that? asks Chris from somewhere far away, unintentionally condescending, but there are no music sheets in front of her and she can’t play it, she _can’t do it._

It’s supposed to be beautiful, to capture moonlight with each note, but the keys are spread out before her white and identical, wrongness lurking beneath any one. The discordant notes are like nails in her eardrums and as the room gets smaller, her heart beats faster and she makes more and more mistakes, until it’s butchered and unrecognizable and—

And then everything bursts all at once. Around her, inside her, and she’s back in a crashed car with a mask on her face as humanity breaks apart. Fires burn until there’s so much smoke the sunlight can’t seep through, and screams—of horror, of the agony of transformation—pound in her ears, and fluid gushes down her legs, clear at first and then bloody, _blood, so much, too much, there shouldn’t be_ any—

Finally she sees him, holds him, stares at clumped black hair and sightless blue eyes and blue lips. He’s cold against her skin, and he doesn’t have a name, and _please, please no we don’t have to burn him, i’m not infected he wasn’t born breathing he can’t be infected please just let me have the body—_

And that’s when she wakes up, the bile already in her mouth. She slides hands-first out of bed and puts her head against the wall as it all comes up. It burns her tongue and hard palate and even behind her nose, just like the salt from the tears burns her eyes.

When her stomach finally stops contracting and the nausea settles, she stares at what she’s done, at her hands limp beside her legs. The tears still come no matter how she tries to hold back the sobs, and she’s glad Billy has already left for the morning so she doesn’t have to _talk about it_ , doesn’t have to give _answers_ or try to put it into _words_.

She could just sit here forever, alone, reeking of her own vomit, and that might be okay. Never moving again, withering away until she doesn’t have to face existence and all the vagaries that come with it. That would be a good day.

But it’s not today.

So somehow, she finds the will to move a leg, brace it, and all at once, like ripping off a bandaid, she stands up. Cleans up. Changes her clothes. Never pauses, because she doesn’t know that she can start again if she does.

Then she goes out to breakfast.

Smiles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Trigger warnings: Stillbirth/infant death, brief discussion of abortion
> 
>  
> 
> So, in Pet I remembered I made a passing mention of Rebecca being pregnant. And there was no fucking way I could let anyone assume that ended happily, not in this AU. Poor Becky. :( But at least so far she's staving off death with a Game of Thrones reference.
> 
> Also, SOMEONE has to be pregnant at the absolute worst time possible (see: The Walking Dead television show, the Walking Dead game seasons 1&2), but Jill will handle it like a boss. Because she's Jill.
> 
> Chapter title comes from the Silent Hill 4 song "Room of Angel".
> 
> Thank you so very much for the kudos and comments!
> 
> -Anna


	3. steve: call off your ghost

Having sex with Sherry really isn’t as great as Steve had thought it would be. (He might’ve assumed Sherry would say something similar if he’d been stupid or vain enough to think she’d actually ever given any thought to having sex with him before they’d actually done it.)

The first time is _supposed_ to be bad, from what little he’s heard—uncoordinated fumblings that lead to blood and pain and awkward, fleeting glances into each other’s eyes. Yet for them, there had been something almost natural about the first time, an unspoken flow that ran smoothly between them. There’d been very little embarrassment then, very little shame—he’d stared fixedly into her too-wide eyes and seen familiar things reflected back in them, the same things that made her blood smell almost sweet and the pain of her nails on his back welcome.

And there, for just a little while, he was able to twist himself round with her, allow _hair—eyes—pleasure—pain—flesh—skin_ to paint a thin veneer over everything else that festered just below. Maybe they’d been in shock at that point, lying there on that cold ship’s floor, doing whatever they could to lessen the blow as their brains tried to process and adjust and disperse the right chemicals to the right places to try to begin the coping process.

Steve’s brain hasn’t done a very good job of it. It’s been months and he still feels like the bottom’s dropped out of his stomach, like when he looks around, he can’t quite correlate himself with where he is.

The world is very unfamiliar now. Sometimes, he thinks it must be what hell is like, down in its deepest depths. They’re all dead and damned and they haven’t even noticed.

In all his years working for him, Steve has never once thought of Wesker as _stupid_ , but seeing things as they are now make him wonder if something that fuck Spencer said to him that night _broke_ him somehow, blinded and reduced him to the point where he honestly thought that this had been a good idea.

It hadn’t been. This isn’t any kind of world Wesker had said it would be.

There are no _gods_ here. They haven’t encountered one survivor yet, much less anyone who’s successfully bonded with Uroboros. What _is_ left are the monsters, insentient, amorphous things that devour and grow until they rip through everything in their path and cover the earth.

Human development has been set back about twenty thousand years and instead of evolution, all that really seems to have been achieved is _extinction._

It’s funny. Before the detonation, Steve really hadn’t thought he’d miss other humans. They were almost all needlessly cruel bastards like Umbrella who did things for power or money or just because they could, or stupid dicks like his father who got the few decent people in the world killed.

But now, it’s just the four of them. They might be the last living people on earth, the only company left for the rest of his life. And he’d give anything for someone, anyone else.

Chris is about a step away from drooling, straightjacketed insanity and once Wesker stopped gloating and realized that everything wasn’t what he thought it would be, Steve would’ve had an easier time talking to a brick wall.

And Sherry . . . well.

Usually she lays there stiff as a corpse and stares at the ceiling, blinking with creepy infrequency, and he thrusts with what enthusiasm he can muster until he comes to an underwhelming conclusion, after which she immediately leaves. He never asks her to stay.

It’s not some of that cliché bullshit like Steve _only loves her like a sister_. Sherry’s fucking _hot_ , completely out of his league hot, pleasing in every way he could’ve asked for—from long blonde hair to a great body and a nice face to those _legs_ of hers—

But the thing is, it’s not very _sexy_ when both of you feel like you’ve failed on the deepest, most crucial level possible. Like you’re both so horrible it’s crushing you from the inside out, digging filthy hooks into you at your innermost point.

It’s hard to fuck or talk or even look at each other when there’s always a ghost in between you.

So when she eventually comes to him, hair chopped short and wearing a combat outfit, guns and supplies strapped to her, he does what he always does, and doesn’t ask her to stay.

“Your hair looks godawful,” he says, and she smiles, a very rare thing these days. Then she throws her arms around him and crushes him to her with more force than she should be capable of, given her size.

“I’ll come back one day,” she says. He feels wetness bloom on his shoulder through the material of his shirt. “I swear I will.”

Then she lets go and turns on her heel, and she doesn’t look back.

Steve moves to a window in time to see her step outside, the wide, dangerous world spread out before her. She seems very small from up above, and he remembers that she was twelve the first time she stepped out a door into the unknown.

He wishes that things could’ve been different. With her now. With Claire then. All those years ago, when he still had a mother and a father and a future, before he knew what it was to be _dead_ and monsters were formless, imaginary things that he thought hid under his bed at night.

Now all Steve has is time, endless time to think about all the ways things could have gone and all that could’ve been, somewhere far away in a life that wasn’t this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FAILED RELATIONSHIP NUMBER ONE, BITCHES! THERE WILL PROBABLY BE MORE TO COME.
> 
> And so Sherry absconds to angstily walk the earth and eventually get around to fucking the hell out of Jake. Poor Steve. I think he's going to start singing "I Dreamed a Dream" soon.
> 
> So, I was going to hold off on writing anything more until the entirety of Revelations 2 was released to see if there were any pertinent, uh . . . revelations, but today I said to myself, "woman, you're using that shit as an excuse be fucking lazy" and this ended up coming about. But definitely expect a few appearances from some Revelations 2 characters later on.
> 
> I unabashedly adore Wesker, but I gotta say, his Uroboros plan really doesn't make any sense. I mean, it would if he wanted *chaos* and *utter apocalypse*, but I don't see how he ever thought the very tiny number of people who adapted to the virus would be able to form any type of civilization, being so few. Also, wouldn't the 99.9% of other lifeforms who were infected but just became monsters like we saw in the game make the world extremely dangerous and nonfunctional? It just seems like any and all progress normal humans had made would be completely set back and whoever remained would have no way of reversing that. Also, even if Uroboros enhanced their body, would it necessarily enhance their intelligence to a degree that they could recreate prior technology if they didn't have any previous experience with the technicalities of it? So basically what he would be getting would be a few physically enhanced/"evolved/advanced" people but everything else completely devolved in every way, which seems to defeat the entire purpose, since isn't really the only point of human evolution been our advancements in civilization and technology and oh god, I'm ranting.
> 
> Anyway, if you got through all of that, I guess I'm going to try to explore a little bit of how the plan didn't quite work out like he wanted.
> 
> The chapter is named after the song 'Call Off Your Ghost' by Dessa.
> 
> Thanks for the kudos! :)
> 
> -Anna


	4. sherry: teach you a lesson in the worst kind of way

For about a week after the mission in Spain, Sherry had made a habit of lying on her bed, hands twisted in the covers and face pressed into the pillow so hard she nearly couldn’t breathe. Sometimes she’d scream and sometimes she’d cry, and other times she’s just stare blankly at the satin material of her pillowcase and let the anger wash over in her big, frothy waves, grinding her teeth at the thought of that stupid cult and the President’s useless daughter and _her_ , _Ada_ , the bitch with a smile on her face and a knife hidden behind her back. Sherry hadn’t really understood the in and outs of why she’d done what she’d done or how she even _could’ve_ ; how after spending years leading one life, she was able to just burn it and all that came with it to the ground and pick up somewhere else entirely.

Something that Sherry never did and never will tell anyone is that she’d seen a lot in Ada she wished could’ve been present in herself, and even some things beyond that. She never failed a mission and she could take care of herself in any situation she was confronted with and she could handle anything and anyone, even Wesker, with unflinching, confident aplomb, flitting untouched from here to there as though her beauty was a shield and she held all the cards.

Sherry had understood, for a while, why Leon had been in love with her. But now she’d darted away again, just like she had from him, and all Sherry had left to show for it was her wet pillow and her fists beating pointlessly against her mattress.

It went on like this for long enough that Wesker eventually came into her room, his presence announced by the sudden dip of her bed to the left of her hip. Fingers had reached over and brushed a few strands of her hair back, somehow without really making contact with her skin.

“It’s always the last lesson,” he told her, voice like shattering glass in the thick silence. “And the hardest. But it’s more important than any of the others.”

“What is?” she demanded, resentful and half-muffled.

“Never leave any part of yourself open to anyone. It’ll always work against you, in one way or another. Never _care_ , Sherry.”

Just a month earlier, she might’ve furrowed her brow and turned and asked him, _Who screwed you up so badly that you believe that?_ But as it was, at that moment, she’d kind of thought that she started believing it, too.

Evidently she hadn’t, though. All these years later and she was still learning that final, most difficult lesson.

It had been like—like _purgatory_ being there, with Wesker and Chris and even Steve. The air had been too still and there had been a permanent bad taste in the back of her mouth, crept up from her throat.

The rage was like a living thing rolling under her skin, but she couldn’t let it out, couldn’t do anything but let it fester.

She’s angry at everyone. She thinks she _hates_ everyone, but she can’t kill them. Chris, she can’t even understand, never has—everyone seems to love him so much, to be devoted and obsessed to the point of self-destruction, but she’s never seen what’s so _great_ about him. He’s just a person, no better or more special than anybody else, and just as easily broken. His own mind is devouring him from the inside out and a part of her is happy for it because it’s a twofold thing—it’s hurting Wesker, too, and Wesker deserves to be hurt.

Of course, it’s very _easy_ to blame it on Wesker, every single bit of it, because it was his plan and his arrogance and his insanity and _himhimhim_. But once he was also a puppet dancing on Spencer’s string, Spencer who thought he was a god long before Wesker ever did, who infected him with the idea. He found that fucking flower and from there her hate can stretch out and out through time to people she’s never met, to Edward Ashford and James Marcus and the Ndipaya and whatever chance of evolution allowed the thing to ever exist in the first place.

And she’s a hypocrite, too, because after Wesker came back from Spencer, there had been something in the air, an electricity that crackled from one person to the next and swept them away. Maybe it had been _folie a deux,_ she and Steve and Chris all sharing in Wesker’s psychosis, and now they all have to share in his guilt.

Sometimes she’s selfish, too, and she hates Claire for failing, for leaving her here to face what’s left and stare into the face of what she helped create. When she gave her that last chance, she opened herself up, all the way, and she let herself _care_ , about the world and about _her_ , a woman she’d known for a night, a matter of hours, ten years ago, who’d left her as soon as she could to go charging into another outbreak on the heels of her completely average, normal, bland, aloof brother when Sherry’s own mother had been too concerned with a virus sample to do anything more than give her a _phone call,_ much less _look_ for her—

Sherry’s ashamed whenever she finds herself thinking that way. (She’s ashamed a lot these days, for more reasons than one.)

The flipside, much more pervasive, is the grief, and at least she can let that seep down into her without fighting it, without feeling like there’s something wrong about it. Steve is like a mirror when she looks at him, bad where Ada was good, but just because he feels the same way doesn’t make it any easier. In the beginning they talked, told each other how _Claire grabbed my hand when I was about to fall_ and _Claire saved me from my father_ , smiled wanly at all the memories tainted irreparably by what happened after.

She feels his eyes on her back as she walks away, but she doesn’t turn around. Instead she walks, walks and walks and walks until even her G-enhanced legs are trembling. She’s alone for the first time in her life, no one there to dictate where she should go or what she should do.

For the first few months, she thinks it’s summer. It’s hot, wherever she is, the air heavy and still and choked with the distinct slick-oil reek of Uroboros. She steps over the twitching black flesh of creatures that have gotten too big to move, walking alongside tentacles into the openings they’ve smashed into buildings. Numerous ones they’ve torn down completely, and in the rubble she searches for food and water, avoiding the smaller monsters that falter unnaturally from place to place, throbbing yellow pustules on their limbs.

When it gets colder, she scavenges a white parka to cover with at night, a pink scarf to twine around her neck. She’s still freezing, but covered by a fine layer of snow, the world looks more like it used to. She likes that.

By the time it all melts, she’s thinner and her hair is brushing her jaw. She still hasn’t seen one living thing. (Maybe that’s better than the alternative, no one to rob her, no one to rape her, no one, no one . . .)

She goes into a grocery store with one wall crumbled beneath a tentacle that seems to have black-red splotches moving under its skin. All the food is rotten, leaking out of packages labeled in a foreign language, but she finds some smaller clothes and new shoes, a pair of scissors and the glass surface of a freezer door to act as a mirror.

On her way out, she grabs a map and compass and starts walking again. Her legs are stronger now, so she doesn’t stop for a very long time.

When she finally arrives, it’s not much changed from how she remembers it. Rotting, dilapidated shanties on a gray-brown coastline, rusting cars, dirt roads. The odd Majini roams here and there, and she shoots them all.

She spends a day looking for a shovel and then three more trying to determine if she’s going in the right direction, because she doesn’t really know where _it_ is. She’s never been there before. Never seen it with her own eyes.

Finally she sees it in the distance, makes it to the base, and it looms over her like her monster-father did once, a long time ago. She doesn’t climb right away—she looks for a path and takes a step, then turns around and lays down and doesn’t quite sleep, boiling in heat that makes it almost impossible to breathe.

Her lungs feel heavy when she does eventually start again, like blackened lumps of tissue that can barely move. She uses the shovel as a cane, wipes filthy sweat from her forehead even as it soaks her clothes.

She has to climb part of the way, fingers too blunt and too small against the rock, and then there’s the prison, the heat-warped remains of holding cells cut straight into the side of the mountain. It burns so hot that the Majini she finds have peeling, blistering skin, their eyes bleeding black down their faces.

She can’t imagine serving a sentence here but maybe that’s the _point_ , that this isn’t a place to come back from.

A rear staircase of soft gray boards takes her up another few feet, and then she climbs again, muscles stretched beyond their limit and dirt shifting precariously under her feet. Finally her hand hits flat surface and she digs in with her nails, keening in the back of her throat as she gives one last heave up and over.

The shovel digs into her back as she rolls over, rope pulling tight against her chest, but the relief is too sweet for her to care. She could lay there like that forever, until her organs boil in her body and all her skin turns into one big sore, so long as she doesn’t have to move. But she knows she can’t. She can’t even take the chance of catching her breath.

Fumbling a machine pistol out of her chest holster, she makes it to her knees, staggers to her feet. She can barely stand straight and her hands are slippery around the gun, heart pounding in her chest.

It’s silent. Still. Lava streams slowly by, bubbles up from geysers in the earth. The remains of the plane are half in the ground, the metal twisted and browned. It seems bigger now than the times she saw it whole.

She approaches with her finger on the trigger and scans the remains for a way in, cautiously reaching up to push aside a piece of sheet metal. She steps into what would’ve been a corner of the cargo bay, eyes automatically darting to search.

She finds what she’s looking for almost immediately and turns on her heel, running back the way she came. She collapses into a pile on her knees and heaves until there’s nothing left, no bile, no saliva, just dryness she chokes on.

At least she didn’t need the gun. The—the damage to the brain must’ve been enough to prevent—she didn’t have to—to—

She throws the gun down with a scream; slams her fingers into the dirt and tears and tears and tears it until she’s breathing so heavily dots spark in her vision.

Finally—finally she runs filthy hands over her face and unties the shovel from around her. She decides on a spot, one that looks like there’s no lava just beneath the surface, and then she digs.

She doesn’t know how long it takes. She doesn’t sleep, just pauses every so often to ladle water into her mouth when her upper palate begins sticking to her tongue.

When the hole is long and deep, she clenches her fists at her sides and turns back to the wreckage. Closes her eyes and remembers what she saw, prepares herself to see it again.

Claire—Claire’s corpse doesn’t look much like Claire anymore. She can make out clumps of red-brown hair, fingernails, the rotting remains of clothing—but beneath it her flesh has liquefied, mixing with blood and running black across the floor. Some of the tissue has decayed away entirely, exposing bone and teeth and putrefying organs and—

And Sherry can _feel_ it, feel everything that made Claire what she was as a living being seep over her own skin, drip down onto her shirt. Her hair is like straw against Sherry’s shoulder, and just when she’s dragged her about halfway to the edge of the cargo bay, she looks down and sees the wound on the back of her head. It’s tiny, she thinks deliriously, but then it would be, wouldn’t it, because it’s always when a bullet exits that it takes skull and brain and blood and skin with it.

She can’t tell if it exited Claire. _She can’t even tell_.

For an instant she wants to _laughcryscream_ , any of them, all of them. But instead she just grits her teeth and takes another step backwards.

She doesn’t really know how she does it—drags her there, lowers her down, covers her with dirt. It’s kind of like she’s there but she isn’t, blinking in and out intermittently as she does what she knows she has to.

Neither of her parents had a grave. No one in Raccoon City did. But Claire will.

She pats down the earth and staggers around collecting rocks to pile at the head, up up up into a little tower. Then she takes her pink scarf out of her pocket and twines it around them, knotting it as securely as she knows how.

Then she finally comes fully back to herself when she collapses at the foot of the grave, elbows on her knees as she pours water over her head and looks at what she’s done.

It’s ugly, to be honest. An ugly grave in an ugly place. But it’s all she can give her.

 _I’m sorry_ , she wants to say—

_I’m sorry it couldn’t be prettier._

_I’m sorry that you couldn’t help Chris. That I can’t help him. That he can’t be helped._

_I’m sorry I can’t kill Wesker. Maybe if you had, things would’ve been different but I—well, he’s always been there, you see? Mom and Dad went away and you went away and Ada went away, and he’s outlasted all of them. The one constant I’ve ever had. So I can’t. And I’m sorry that that’s how it is._

_But most of all_

“I’m sorry that I couldn’t save you like you saved me.”

She sits there for a long time before she stands up. Maybe she sleeps—she isn’t sure. But her vision seems a little clearer and her legs a little stronger when she walks over to the edge of the drop and stares out at everything below.

It’s all red and brown and hot as far as she can see, and she decides that next, she wants to go somewhere very different.

North, then, to someplace cold and white.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've crack-shipped Sherry/Ada ever since Ada's line in RE6 about "how the monsters love to chase you". I also see Sherry as having a few, uh, abandonment issues, given everything . . .
> 
> I googled what extreme heat would do to a corpse and all I could find was that it would speed up decomposition. So I tried to take it from there. (It's really been too long since I last watched CSI.)
> 
> I realize that the prison cut into the volcano only appeared in The Mercenaries and therefore isn't canon, but I always thought it was kind of fucking awesome, as implausible as it is. Also, I don't know whether the Majini, already being infected with the Plagas, would also turn into Uroboros creatures . . . probably they would, but oh well.
> 
> Also, I love the Wesker and Sherry guardian relationship, so I had to include a little moment of twisted bonding. (I also ship it, but I'm not even going there . . .)
> 
> Chapter title comes from Fall Out Boy's "Just One Yesterday".


	5. alex: the goddess of imaginary light

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There aren't really very many spoilers and none specifically plot-wise, but just consider Revelations 2 spoilers fair game from here on out.

Oh Albert, Albert, Albert, what have you done?

Oh Albert—or should I perhaps start calling you Al, like your little friend Birkin? He thought he was _very_ clever, and look where that got him. Do you think about that much these days, Al?

No, no. That doesn’t come out quite right. I believe you’ll always be _Albert_ to me. It’s what you always were when you were a name on a piece of paper, a name in a file. I could really call you Number Thirteen, and it would mean the same thing to me.

You thought you were very clever too, didn’t you? Though I suppose I must admit here, even _I_ thought you were for a while. You were the only other one to even halfway near the lowest dregs of my greatness, to claw your way through tests and trials and conditioning and _survive_. And so for a little while it was Twelve and Thirteen, the only worthy two, the best and the brightest, but then—

Tsk tsk. Stupid little brother. You’re like Icarus and Prometheus all in one. You flew too close to the sun and then you gave all the mortals its divine power. Anyone can be a god now just by chance of genes, and those are fickle things, aren’t they?

Fickle, fickle, fickle things. Illogical.

The right to be a god is _mine_ , after all, certainly mine above _yours_ and Spencer’s. Birds should feast on your liver, Albert, while I sit on Olympus and _laugh and laugh_ —

But no one’s laughing now. The world is too quiet for that, and I’m not sure I have lungs anymore. I’m not sure I breathe.

I don’t know what I am. I’m starting to lose _who_ I am. It fades more and more each day along with all the other higher functionings, memory and knowledge and language all somewhere far back into a prison cell in my mind.

Or maybe it’s the reverse. _I’m_ the cell, and off off they go, escaping away to wide open spaces between the fabric of existence and nonexistence, leaving me to serve my sentence.

I don’t know what that sentence is, but it would be pointless to tell me that information.

I’m experiencing it on my own body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I wanted to write an Alex chapter but I didn't really want it to be very long because I was planning to write it in wonky-ass first person and be all vague and shit.
> 
> Also, there are characters I hate: Joffrey, Lucrecia Crescent, half the cast of Telltale's The Walking Dead, etc. Then there's Alex Wesker. She's just such a sadistic bitch, and the way she used Lottie to torment Natalia in the DLC really got under my skin. *shudder*
> 
> The final two lines are nearly straight from a Kafka file you can find in-game. Also, I'm assuming here that (Albert) Wesker wasn't aware of the Wesker Children project or Alex for the majority of his life, as Spencer *explains* it to him in RE5 and he seems surprised by it. Which they seem to contradict by what they imply in Revelations 2.
> 
> Chapter title comes from 'Imaginary' by Evanescence. Yes, my itunes library consists mostly of high octane angst and pop songs, why do you ask?


	6. chris: all i am is all i could not mention

The world is so quiet now, he’s able to hear the slow crack of his own sanity, the grind of the ragged edges of his psyche rubbing into one another, the drone-hum of his thoughts as they pass through the refuse in the center of his mind. Something in him has broken straight down the middle and there’s a constant pressure behind his eyes, a sick ache pressing out from within.

He keeps his eyes shut, mainly. Pushes his fingers into them until they feel like they’re about to pop and just sits there as still as he can, a rock in a stream that dredges on around him.

He never knows when he sleeps. Sometimes he can’t even tell when he’s awake. He sees the same thing everywhere—on the backs of his eyelids, in the midst of dull syrupy unconsciousness, on the walls and the floor. _They are in Kijuju_ , it says, over and over and over.

 _Who’s there_?

Well. Well, _her_. She still is. And those flowers. The monsters. The last remnants of who he was. A beginning to things and an end to them. A snake swallowing its own tail. It’s a pulse point throbbing under his skin, in the middle of his forehead.

Once he wondered if it was written across his face, seared into his flesh, but when he looked in the mirror, all he saw was _himself_ , the afterimage of who he’d been lurking within the reality of what he is. He remembers things now, much more than he has in a long time, and as his place in this existence inverts on itself and gains scope, he can feel the echoes of thoughts and ideas and hopes that that died unrealized in the head of a man who isn’t here anymore, bashed out of his brain by impact with the ground and a drug and—and—

He doesn’t like looking at himself. Doesn’t like his hair, or his eyes, or his face.

He breaks the mirror and goes back to his room and sits with his eyes closed. His hand is bleeding. He can feel it drip down onto his leg, soak through the material of his pants. Then it stops, healed already, and he just grinds his teeth a little harder.

He doesn’t feel like a god. He has a virus in his body, can feel worms squirming against the underside of his skin, and he is as far from divine as he could possibly be.

Wesker wanted to remold the world in the same way he had Chris, but there’s not much control any of them can exercise over anything anymore. They can barely even feed themselves, and there’s nothing very _godly_ about that.

The thing is, Progenitor-derived viruses affect the metabolism, he thinks—he’s never been very clear on the technical biological details. But he does know it makes you eat, _a lot_ , and no matter how big those food stores might’ve seemed beforehand, they deplete very quickly.

Chris doesn’t care much about that, though. Let his body burn his muscles, his stomach eat itself and reform from oily black tentacles. He’s _unnatural_ but maybe he’s always been. Claire came looking for him and finally, finally she found him, a truer him than she’d ever seen.

He can’t distinguish between what parts were always there and what parts Wesker put there, but maybe that’s because there is no difference. He’s always been, just not always uncovered.

He wishes he didn’t know himself. That he could sink down into the kind of synthetic-happy oblivion of that drug and forget all parts of who he is, wash every thought and nuance away until he has no idea what he’s capable of.

A happy, stupid monster that doesn’t know it’s a monster. Something beyond the capacity of stewing in itself day after day, concerned only with _eating—eating—eating_.

Chris isn’t hungry. He hasn’t been in a long time. He doesn’t think he ever will be again.

“You have to,” hisses Steve after he’s thrown the food down between them. Chris stares past him, at the four words written over and over on the wall above his shoulder. He smells meat and it filters down his throat as the taste of blood.

“You don’t deserve to die yet!” he shouts when he becomes frustrated with the silence. “Death is all—black and calm and—and _suffocating_ but even then it’s too good for you! You bastard, you—” His voice cracks, muscles losing rigidity as he slumps to the side of the bed. “She was always looking for you. Why couldn’t you have just—?” He slams his hands down, curls them into fists.

“Fine then,” he says after a long, heavy pause. His voice is quieter. “Die. Maybe it’ll hurt Wesker, at least.”

There have been a lot of times when Chris has thought he’d known Wesker down to the tiniest minutiae, but he supposes it’s easy to think that when you don’t have all the facts. And Chris has finally started to doubt that he’ll ever have a complete set of those. There are twists and turns to Wesker’s life that he won’t ever know or understand, and though maybe that he can now remember the man looking at a deformed gray virus-freak and calling it the _ultimate lifeform_ should make him unsurprised by all that’s happened, he still is.

He can reconcile Wesker and blasphemous arrogance but he can’t imagine him outside of a world he can exploit to his own gain, devoid of anyone to manipulate or consider himself _better_ than.

Now he’s destroyed almost all those things that used to make him what he was. Chris knows he’s the last holdover, that a piece of Wesker’s identity is wrapped up through the _thing_ he’s made of him. Maybe Wesker _would_ suffer if he died.

But there’s a taste of blood seeping down the back of his nose to his mouth, and there’s writing on the wall and behind his eyes and sometimes, he thinks he can feel heat licking at the fine hair on the back of his neck.

So he picks up a piece of something and puts it in his mouth, chews without taste and swallows it down. It lingers at what he imagines must be the point where esophagus meets stomach, not really wanting to go any further.

He repeats until his hand hits the empty glass of the plate. His fingers slip around the edge, tightening incrementally with each second that passes, and then all at once he heaves himself up.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been in that room. He only foggily remembers how he got there in the first place.

The room is in a house that’s half-laboratory, fine plush carpet leading onto stainless steel tile. Chris drops the plate into the first sink he sees and isn’t surprised when turning the faucet brings no water.

Still he slumps, braced against the edge of the counter. He breathes in slowly through his teeth.

“Chris?”

His fingers clench. His chest feels odd, like his heart isn’t there. And when he turns around and looks at Wesker, he finds it hard to see him through the jumble of letters slashed across him over and over again. Some of the words aren’t even legible but he recognizes them anyway.

“Finally out of bed, are you?” Wesker says, or something to that effect. Chris hears his tone more than anything, that same impatient condescension, and _how dare he?_ This is practically the first time he’s even seen him since—since— _in however long_ and that’s all he has to say?

“You son of a bitch,” Chris breathes, his fist flinging out. For half an instant Wesker looks startled, but the impact wipes it off his face. It actually sends him stumbling, and even though he catches himself and responds with a speed that Chris probably would’ve once found unnatural, he can counter it easily now.

He’s a _god_ , too, after all, if that’s still what Wesker insists on calling it. It’s nothing special anymore, and now he can experience what _vengeance_ feels like from a god, what _wrath_ feels like.

Chris breaks bones for the Mansion. For Raccoon City. For Rockfort Island and Antarctica. He draws blood for the S.T.A.R.S. Teams, and hits especially hard for Enrico. Not because he died, but because after all this time Chris can no longer bring himself to feel _sorry_ about it and he hates that he can’t.

His life should’ve been entirely different than this—mundane and boring with him going through it stupid and shallow, satisfied with little thrills from his job. He could’ve dwelt on the surface, knowing only one facet of himself, and died happily. And Wesker _took_ that from him, in what—the name of work? _Love_?

Chris hates that word. It makes him hit harder, as hard as he can. This thing in front of him is like a black void in his brain, a cancer that’s spread and spread for years and he’s done _horrible_ things because he _loves_ it—

“Why?” he shouts, hands down around Wesker’s throat, nails drawing blood. Wesker’s hard and he’s hard and he just wants to squeeze and squeeze until his tongue lolls out and his eyes roll back and he never has to see them again. “Why did you have to make me—?”

Wesker knees him in the stomach and flips them over, hands coming up around Chris’s wrists. They strain against each other, Chris’s fingernails taking chunks of tissue with them as they come away centimeter by centimeter. Then Wesker grips a little tighter and he screams, broken wrist bones taking the feeling out of his hands.

They’ve already begun to heal as Wesker looks down on him, eyes burning orange-red.

“But that’s the thing, isn’t it?” he says. “I didn’t _make_ you do anything. You weren’t drugged. You were completely under your own power. I _asked_ you. And you made a choice.”

Wesker lets him go and gets up, but Chris stays there, staring at the ceiling. He thinks he tastes salt.

Because he already knows that.

He knows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was delayed as long as it was by Dragon Ball Z: Abridged. That's some distracting shit.
> 
> Actually the first thought I ever had that eventually led to this fic was 'you know, after Chris kinda snaps out of his shock I bet he'd just lay the goddamn smackdown on Wesker, 'cause hitting things is how he deals with most of his problems.' So here it finally is. :)
> 
> Song title comes from 'Flowers for a Ghost' by Thriving Ivory.
> 
> Uh . . . if you leave kudos or comment you can have a Dragon Ball. Just don't steal the tv.


	7. jill: a thousand silhouettes dancing on my chest

The last time Jill had ever even given a half-thought to children feels like a lifetime ago. She’d just met Chris Redfield, and at that point he had been handsome and fresh and very untried by the world, with a spark of life in his eyes and a genuine smile on his face. And so for a brief time, she’d thought—among numerous other, vastly less wholesome things—that their kids would be very cute.

Of course, those were just the passing fantasies of that other, softer girl she’d once been, still too naïve to even realize how stupid she was. She and Chris would never be, and she was never meant to have children.

Her own parents shouldn’t have had any, either. She’d had a mother who cared too little and a father who cared just enough to teach her what he thought she needed to know to stay alive without ever having to go stand on the corner of French and Ivy, not realizing that his kind of life was just as unsustainable as that one.

There’d been no stability for her until the wake up of an arrest, of finally experiencing _consequence_ , glimpsing into the future and seeing only dead ends. But that had only led to the military and then to S.T.A.R.S., her fresh start that ended in just as much disaster. Nothing ever seems to go quite right for her—that thought has lingered in the back of her mind for a long time, only to finally be seared into the forefront as ten years of blood and pain and loss slipped through her fingers at the whim of a maniac on the other side of the world.

Jill isn’t like Leon. She doesn’t delude herself, reject her own logic to soften the blow of what she already knows. Claire is dead.

It had been there since she first heard the rumors about a blond man in Kijuju—an itch she couldn’t scratch, a slow, tightening creep in her stomach. She had learned a long time ago to trust her own instincts but this time, of _all times—_

She was making wedding preparations, something she thought she’d never do. Rebecca was having a baby shower. Chris’s corpse had finally gone mostly quiet in that corner of her mind she’d regulated him to and the marks that Raccoon City had left were abating, like after veering so far off course, things were just starting to come back to where they were supposed to be. She’d settled into where she’d ended up and made her peace and God, after all this time, didn’t she _deserve_ that much?

Africa seemed so—far away. And Wesker was—she _wanted_ Wesker to be dead. When someone’s shadow has stretched over you and everyone you love for so long, eventually you’ll do anything make it go away. Tell yourself a lie again and again until you believe it, push that flicker of doubt down deep in you and never let it surface.

Now, she sits on her cot in her room hundreds of feet below a world she might never see again, and she finally acknowledges what she thinks she’s known all along. Chris died for nothing. _He saved your life_ , Carlos had told her all those years ago, but she didn’t see the worth in that then and she certainly doesn’t now.

It’s Survivor’s Guilt, of course. She’s seen it before, when Chris seemed to hate himself so much just for breathing after the Mansion, as though he’d done something _wrong_ in keeping himself alive. Mikhail Victor had almost out and said as much to her as he laid there on that train with his guts threatening to fall out, itching to get back up and go absolve himself.

If she hadn’t been so exhausted, maybe she would have told him that your own _survival_ wasn’t your _fault_ —it didn’t prove you any better than your comrades just because you were still alive, you didn’t disrespect their memories by _existing_. Maybe you just fought a little harder or got luckier or a thousand little variables happened to come together in your favor by chance.

Then Mikhail went and died for her. The first person to do so. (Not the last.) She thinks about that a lot these days.

If he’d just have let Nemesis crush her neck. Or later, if there had been no cure for Carlos to find at that hospital. Or if Chris just hadn’t, if he just wouldn’t have—

Maybe it would all be the same. She can’t know for sure. But the possibilities shadow her steps and seep into her dreams and sit like a rock in her stomach, and this time there’s never going to be any _peace_ to find with it. Yet whatever she thinks of it, whether or not she _deserves_ it, she’ll never end it.

When they first got down here, the bunker was a lot more crowded. Then about ten days later, after the shock wore off and reality set in, the suicides began. There were a lot of nooses, a lot of slit wrists, a few swallowed tongues. _Less strain on the food supply_ , thought Jill’s viciously practical side, though for the most part she didn’t feel much of anything save Chris and Mikhail pressing down on her shoulders, preventing her from doing the same. It would be like spitting on their graves.

Jill’s never been one to give up easily, anyway. It’s the opposite that wears on her—this sitting and staying, going through the motions everyday without doing anything. She’s trapped in a cement cage breathing recycled air into a body that’s suddenly out of her own control, and up above Wesker has the whole world all to himself. Cockroaches are always the ones who keep surviving, after all, and that nauseating rage isn’t going to leave her chest until she does something about it.

She imagines that this, this is a clearer picture of how Claire felt for the last three years than she’s ever really had before. This is the feeling that got her killed, but Jill would go down that exact same path if she could. ( _ ~~maybe, maybe if she’d just been there with her on that path from the beginning, if she hadn’t told herself a lie to make herself feel better, then maybe~~_ )

Instead, she sits uselessly on her little cot in her little room. There are a few day-to-day responsibilities, primarily organizational concerns, things to keep the bunker running smoothly because at this point, there can’t be a thought about what’s above. The scientists don’t even have a name for the virus and there’s no venturing up to study it. It’s possible that day might never come.

At first, Jill tried to keep track of the date, but with the lack of clear days and nights, it’s all started to blur into one continuous period. It’s only every now and then when she reaches down and brushes her stomach and realizes she’s gotten bigger that she goes cold and feels any defined passage of time.

Moira Burton seems bizarrely fascinated with the pregnancy. Whenever she sees her, she coos to her stomach and lays a hand on her to feel for movement, and Jill would like nothing more than to scream at her to go away, to stop being so goddamn _enthusiastic_ about it. But she just doesn’t have the heart.

“He wishes I was the one who died, you know,” says the girl one day when Jill’s about five months gone. She doesn’t want to go to dinner yet because the others always try to offer her part of their food and never listen when she refuses it. Moira doesn’t go because she avoids any room Barry’s in whenever she can. “He wishes they were here instead of me. I can see it every time he looks at me.”

She knows what that look is like. She’s never seen it on Barry, but she did once on Claire, when Jill got off of that helicopter alone. It took a long time for it to go away.

“Sometimes,” Moira continues, her voice thick. She turns away and runs the back of her hand roughly over her face. “Sometimes I wish the same fucking thing.”

Jill can’t tell her that she’ll never stop thinking that. And the girl wouldn’t believe her if she said that Barry wouldn’t have been able to go on at all if he’d lost Moira along with Polly and Kathy. So she doesn’t say anything.

It’s cruel of her to bring a child into this. A part of her wants to push some of the blame off onto Rebecca, because Jill’s sorry about what happened but she has to wonder if the woman has ever stopped thinking about her baby’s death long enough to imagine what it would’ve been like to be facing his _life_ in this place. Maybe it wouldn’t be so black and white to her then, and she would’ve handed over some of the pills Jill had asked for continuously in the first weeks without excuses about infections and retained tissues and a thousand other potential complications.

In the end, though, she knows that logically, only she and Carlos are to blame. They were careless, back in that first shocked week—it was surreal, looking at it now. Everything was just _gone_ , so suddenly, so violently, that for a while it seemed like nothing mattered. They were all powerless and so nothing they could possibly do had any consequences.

Her wedding—that fucking all-important wedding that seems so insignificant now—never happened. Her bachelorette party had been limping along for a couple of hours, reminding her starkly that she really didn’t have that many female friends, when everyone’s cell phones began to ring and buzz nearly simultaneously.

The world had never really been _out_ of danger, as it was, not when viral weaponry seemed to inevitably end up in the hands of morally bankrupt, mentally unstable scientists who treated it with the same caution as they would a strain of fucking chickenpox. There had already been so many near misses.

Frequently, she finds herself staring off into space wondering what was different about _this_ time—was it an accident? Did Wesker _mean_ to do this? What did Claire find when she got to Kijuju and how—how did it _beat_ her?

“You’re the one who knew Wesker,” says Carlos. Jill could almost laugh at that—the only thing she ever knew was the façade of a corporate spy. She hadn’t even heard his natural accent until years later.

“Did he strike you as the type who wanted to kill . . . you know, everyone?” Carlos’s voice doesn’t have much inflection these days. Sometimes he stares at the wall so blankly that she wants to slap him, scream in his face until he really looks and sees her again.

“I thought it was just . . . what he did. His job. That it was about money, maybe.”

Carlos huffs a laugh. “When I was with the UBCS, a lot of us were in it for the money. Most of us. The private sector’s better for that. But there was always that one guy who . . . wasn’t.” His lips twist slightly at unpleasant memories. “More than one a lot of the time, at Umbrella.”

Wesker used to be a scientist. She found that out in the Mansion laboratory, when he’d made her into a rat and let her loose in his maze. That’s all any of them had been to him—moving parts in an experiment, their eventual deaths more valuable than their lives ever were.

(Sometimes she wonders if that’s what hurt Chris the deepest, that Wesker abandoned him in that meat grinder along with the rest of them. But then she remembers the long, dark run to the Mansion, when those dogs had come so close to ripping out his throat, but Wesker had stopped them from doing exactly what he should’ve wanted them to. Sometimes that scene replays over and over again in her head and the possibility occurs to her that Chris was less of a lab animal to him and more of a pet he was passingly fond of, scratching behind the ears and giving treats in between kicks to the ribs. That always makes her uncomfortable because in those moments she’s almost glad he’s dead, that he’s somewhere beyond Wesker’s reach.)

The world is now nothing more than Wesker’s _maze_. He’s reduced every human being to his rat and there’s nothing Jill can do about it for herself. Chances are the surface will never be safe enough in her lifetime, and she’ll die in this place without ever seeing it again.

She’s started to realize that she doesn’t have to.

Prior to labor, the most pain Jill had ever experienced had come when the Nemesis had caught her leg with a tentacle and lifted her off the ground, only to slam her down an instant later. Hitting the filthy garbage-covered floor, _hearing_ the crack of her ribs and collarbone and cheekbone just before her vision whited out and she lost awareness of everything except the feel of those bones splintering, even though her body knew all on its own that she couldn’t stop, couldn’t ride out the shock, had to keep moving, keep shooting the pipes or coming this far would all be for _nothing_ —

At least that was all at once. Labor is a long, repetitive torture that she can only lay there and let happen.

Around the fifth hour, Rebecca offers her pain medication and it would be a lie to say she isn’t tempted. But she talks herself out of it with reminders that this isn’t an _emergency_ , just a natural thing that she has to let run its course. Women did it for thousands of years before the human species became endangered.

Around hour twelve, as she finally starts pushing and enters a new realm of agony, Carlos tells her to _breathe_. She crushes his hand with all the strength she has left in her body.

At hour fourteen, the natural painkillers have built up well in her body. She’s been cleaned up and dried off and given water she could actually keep down. Carlos is asleep in the chair beside the bed and her daughter is swaddled against her chest, happily digesting her first meal.

It’s a little amazing, holding the youngest person in existence. A maternal part of her that’s only existed for the last hour wants to wrap her up tightly enough to block out the entire world. It wants to keep her just as she is now, a blank slate with no knowledge of the way things were, or what things are now.

Jill can’t do that, though. It almost scares her, how much hate she’s going to instill, the things she’s going to tell her child again and again until they’re engraved in her mind, a permanent fixture carried in her thoughts and coloring her actions however long she lives.

She takes a deep breath, then opens her mouth. “Once upon a time there was a city. That’s where this all started. It doesn’t exist anymore. Neither does the company that ruined it. There’s only one man left. He’s still out there, somewhere . . .”

Christina Claire Oliveira doesn’t understand yet. She won’t for a long time. But one day, Wesker will know her name and see her with her mother’s face and even if Jill’s already dead by then, it’ll still be her that kills him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jill and poor Cici are now going to reenact some unholy mix of the beginning of Fallout 3 and Kovu's childhood from the Lion King 2.
> 
> The chapter title is from 'Silhouettes' by Of Monsters and Men.
> 
> Thanks for the kudos and comments!  
> -Anna


	8. lucas: time and mercy is out of your reach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are really no RE7 spoilers here, except in the vaguest terms. In this universe, the events of the game couldn't have even happened. Still, there are characters from RE7 and little mention of a plot point in the end note, so be aware.

“You’re the real monster here,” Sis says, her weary face pinched up with all that righteous anger. “More’n any a them things outside.”

Lucas laughs and pets her hair. It’s greasy against his fingers, and he raises them to his mouth, licks them, tears out a nail with his teeth. Then the black little tendrils writhe up and reform it an instant later. (He doesn’t feel much pain anymore. Or cold, or hot, or sadness or hunger or _anything_ except a frenzied, screaming _pleasure_.)

“Maybe so, Zo,” he says, giggling at the rhyme. “But I sure as hell am enjoying it.”

He turns his eyes to the screen and blinks at the reflection of his own uneven pupils, focusing his gaze. The screen is grainy from the piece of shit VHS film, but ain’t that just the story of his life? Stuck out in a goddamn bayou living in the dark ages, brain squirming against the back of his eyes for entertainment?

(He can actually feel it now. Feel how it moves.)

This bitch isn’t nearly as fun as little Clancy was, with all his screaming and begging. His tears had tasted nice, his skin, too—not as much as his ashes, though.

Pantsuit blonde here, now, the _kindest_ thing he can say about her is she’s got _spirit_. Be kind, Mama used to say. Try to find just one nice thing about everyone. (But she said a lot of things.)

Not that all her spitting and screeching has kept her out of this room. But she’s not doing it right. She’s not playing by the fucking _script_.

_Loser, loser, loser,_ he chants, out loud or in his mind or both or neither.

“But it’s nothin’ new, is it?” Zoe continues, rattling her chains. It had taken him a little while to make ones that could contain her, what with her being pretty strong now, too. But the gift don’t like her quite as much as it likes him.

“All them rumors around town. Mama and Daddy wouldn’t hear ‘em. Wouldn’t even _entertain the thought_. Not about their boy. But you did kill Oliver, didn’t you? You _murdered_ him.”

He rolls his eyes, digs his hand into her head just a little too hard. “Nobody cried over that sumbitch.”

“That ain’t the point!”

He doesn’t much hear her, as Arissa or Alyson or Alyssa or what-the-fuck-ever the old bitch’s preppy name is has just put the candle on the cake.

Only to immediately duck and run.

The explosion knocks her into the wall, but it just kinda . . . _fizzles_. No spark, no fire, because she somehow managed to stick an icepick into the eye socket of his trap and scramble around the delicate sequence of events.

Fuck. He knew making Clancy tote that bigass tape recorder with him in the party room was a bad idea. Should’ve torn the reel out, but watching it over and over and over and over and over again was just so. damn. _fun_.

“You’re supposed to be _dead_!” he yells into the microphone, grabbing the nearest stick of dynamite and popping it through the hole in the wall.

Except then the bitch runs _towards_ it.

“How do you like it, you balless redneck fuck?!” she screams as she throws it back the way it came. Then she flips him off, waving her hand around at whatever direction the camera could be.

Lucas is followed out of the control room by heat and sound and the rattle of the walls, his sister screaming until the thin black ropes start knitting her back together.

“Untie me,” she pleads, rattling her chains. “I’m not with him, I’m not, please untie me—”

“I’m going to fucking get my gun back and go _kill_ him,” says blondie.

“I’ll help you! Just—”

Their voices fade, his feet starting to blur as he makes for the mines. It feels like there’s something gaping and dark opened up behind him, nipping at his heels.

But the gift likes him the best. It always has. He’ll be okay. He’ll be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Why yes, Lucas, for all that he was a vicious little psychopath, was my favorite RE7 character. Mainly because he actually had a character. I made him (and the Baker family) compatible with Uroboros just because they seemed to take to Eveline's mold pretty well and, I don't know, I guess eventually SOMEONE had to turn up who successfully bonded with Uroboros. Wesker probably didn't have a redneck family in the bayou in mind, though.
> 
> It's implied in RE7 that Alyssa Ashcroft now lives in Dulvey, as you can find an article in the local paper written by her. And you just know she's badass enough after Raccoon City to avoid being infected by Uroboros.
> 
> I kind of ship Lucas and Clancy in a horrifying, oh god why way. So I implied it just a little bit.
> 
> Chapter title comes from the folk song 'O Death' which is more from my neck of the hillbilly woods, Appalachia.
> 
> Thanks for your kudos!!  
> -Anna


End file.
